Empowering communities to internalize, translate, and celebrate God's Word in their mother tongue.
Shema is a community within Youth With A Mission (YWAM) focused on ending Bible poverty through Oral Bible Translation (OBT). We believe that for many language communities, Scripture is best received and shared in spoken form—through stories, conversation, and celebration—not only on the page.
We partner with communities to:
- Internalize Scripture through storytelling, repetition, and memory.
- Translate the Bible into natural, spoken language that sounds like them.
- Celebrate God’s Word in the language and format that speaks to their hearts.
If that vision resonates with you, we’d love to connect. Our website and documentation are great places to start.
We build open-source software that supports the full OBT workflow: from drafting and meaning maps to recording in the field, transcription, and AI-assisted analysis.
- Translation & field tools — Web and Flutter apps for facilitators and validators: voice translation, mentorship tracking, Tripod Studio for generating and reviewing oral Scripture, and data collection for monolingual recordings.
- Meaning Maps & drafting — Tools that help teams work from Biblical semantic structure (e.g. BHSA-based meaning maps) and generate drafts for oral translation.
- ML & speech — Acoustic tokenization pipelines, model training (e.g. XLSR/MMS/XEUS, vocoders, pair translation experiments), and demos for low-resource transcription and acoustemes.
- Docs & process — Documentation for systems, architecture, and processes; RFCs for proposals and decisions.
We use TypeScript, Python, and Flutter across the stack. You can browse all of our repositories in the Shema GitHub organization.
- Documentation: docs.shemaywam.com — architecture, systems, and how our tools fit together.
- Website: shemaywam.com — who we are and how to get involved.
